1. Field of Art
The present invention generally relates to customizing, fabricating and distributing of wound dressings, and more specifically, to sending specifications associated with customized wound dressings to facilities located remotely from a wound care clinic for fabrication of the wound dressings.
2. Background of the Invention
Currently, the common method of treating wounds is to cover the wounds with wound dressings. Although some wounds may be treated using generic wound dressings, others need customized wound dressings that may include multiple layers of material with different material properties as well as customized shapes and sizes. Typically, a medical practitioner such as a nurse or doctor, first inspects the wound, and then determines based on their personal knowledge, experience, and practice guidelines, the materials, sizes and shapes of wound dressings needed to treat the wound. The practitioner then manually crafts the dressing, first by selecting from an available inventory of standardized dressing supplies, appropriate materials, and then cutting and joining different layers of the materials. The resulting wound dressings are then applied to the wound by the medical practitioners at the wound care clinic. This process thus critically depends on the skill and knowledge of the practitioner as well as what dressing materials happened to be available. If a particular dressing material is not available, then the practitioner must select an alternative, which may be less than satisfactory.
Normally, a patient needs to have the wound dressing replaced on a regular basis, especially for chronic wounds. In order to replace the wound dressings, the patient must either visit the wound care clinic or order components of replacement wound dressings from a wound dressing distributor or a pharmacy. For regulatory reasons, the wound care clinic is prohibited from selling and delivering the wound dressings to patient's home or other facilities where the patient may be residing. Such delivering of the wound dressings is reserved for the wound dressing distributors or other medically related retail outlets. In order to reduce a patient's visits to the wound care clinic, the wound care clinic writes a wound dressing prescription which can be used by the patient in a normal retail setting or can be sent directly to a wound dressing distributor. A conventional prescription only identifies which prepackaged dressing products are to be provided to the patient. The wound dressings are then purchased and/or delivered to the patient's home or a nearby medical facility where the wound dressing may be applied to the wound. In either case, either the patient or a medical practitioner visiting the patent's home must still assemble the final wound dressing from the packaged materials and apply it to the wound. Typical patients may have multiple wounds to be treated and that may require crafting of wound dressings based on different combination of standard wound dressing pre-packaged materials. Due to the differences in skills and abilities among practitioners and patients, this approach may result in inconsistency in how the final wound dressings are crafted and applied, and ultimately, therefore, in the performance of the dressings and how the wounds heal.
The process of picking and organizing kits made out standard size wound dressings at the wound dressing distributors or retail outlets takes up a considerable amount of time because each individual wound dressing needs to be crafted manually by human operators in the patient's home. After receiving orders, the wound dressing distributor organize and sends to the patients or the medical facility a kit of standard wound dressings that typically lasts thirty (30) days, using the same set of materials. However, as the wound condition changes during the healing process that may take several months, the provided wound dressings may become inappropriate for the wound. Therefore, it is preferable to prepare and send the wound dressings to the patients in a smaller batch so that the wound dressings can be adjusted with progress of the wound condition. The prolonged time for receiving orders and preparing the wound dressings, however, makes it difficult for the dressing distributors to prepare and send smaller batches of wound dressings to the patients or the medical facility.
The prepared kit of standard wound dressing materials may not be suitable for the patients for a number of reasons. These flawed wound dressings may result from (i) inaccurate matching of the wound dressing materials needed as the wound healing progresses, (ii) inappropriate designing of the wound dressings based on existing standard packaging, and (iii) non-compliant preparation of the patient's wound dressing based on the kit of standard packaging sent to the patient. Due to these reasons, it is estimated that up to 80% of the patient's wound dressings using conventional wound treatment system and method are flawed or inappropriate for the wounds at the specific time of treatment. Flawed wound dressings may adversely affect the wound healing process and prolong the wound treatment.